[1] Along these lines, cross-cultural leadership has developed as a way to understand leaders who work in the newly globalized market.
Today's international organizations require leaders who can adjust to different environments quickly and work with partners and employees of other cultures.
[3][4] The Implicit Leadership Theory (ILT) asserts that people's underlying assumptions, stereotypes, beliefs and schemas influence the extent to which they view someone as a good leader.
Paternalistic leadership “combines strong discipline and authority with fatherly benevolence and moral integrity couched in a ‘personalistic’ atmosphere”.
Although it is a relatively new area of focus in leadership research, evidence has been found supporting the relationship between paternalism and positive work attitudes in numerous cultures, including those of the Middle East, Latin America, and Pacific Asia.
The authors describe organizational leadership as “the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members”.
[2]: 494 The authors note that there is no universal definition for culture, but GLOBE's definition includes “shared motives, values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of significant events that result from common experiences of members of collectives and are transmitted across age generations”.
[24]: 7 International executive plays an important role in the development of enterprises, the success of multinational corporations (MNCs) largely depends on the adaptability of their leadership and the effectiveness of managing people across borders.
[26] In researching the international executive, Spreitzer et al. (1997) found that general intelligence, business knowledge, interpersonal skills, commitment, courage and ease in dealing with cross-cultural issues are traits that resonate throughout the literature in illustrating a successful international executive.
[7]: 480 In international business, cross-cultural competence refers to “an individual’s effectiveness in drawing upon a set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes in order to work successfully with people from different national cultural backgrounds at home or abroad”.
There is a strong agreement across the literature that the selection process plays a key role in hiring the people who will be most effective cross-cultural leaders.
The articles detail specific personality traits and individual differences that promote quality cross-cultural leadership for multicultural settings.
They also all emphasize across the board the need to hire individuals who already have prior extensive international experience, beyond vacationing in a given country.
[24][30][29][32] Spreitzer, McCall Jr., Mahoney (1997) believe that executives attain these skills through continuous learning, and an array of differentiated projects and experiences which all lead to an accumulated knowledge.